2008/12/30

Please accept my humblest apologies for destroying your culture. In the spirit of internationalism, I promise not to get offended if you choose to ignore Double-Meat Day.

Sincerely,

The Lapinian Consul-General.

So, I did it.

After thinking much of the day about very little at all—an unfortunate side effect of having had no available fires to fight at work that wouldn't have set even more alight—I decided that, gosh darnit, I really didn't have a good reason not to violate more human rights. So, on the way home, I stopped at the store, acquired the necessary torture devices, and came home and made Abominable Poutine.

This turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. Geneva should be notified.

I brought water to a boil, then put four red potatoes—about two pounds—into the water and cooked them for four minutes. Then they came out and went into a cold-water bath. After fully cool, I sliced them with an apple corer to produce more-or-less even wedges, which I left on paper towels to drain. This would form the base layer of the unholy disaster.

For gravy, I took approximately one tablespoon of bacon-turkey grease off of the top of the SOLO cup in the fridge and put it into another pan on the stove, melted it on medium heat, and added flour to form a roux, which I cooked until golden. Scraping off the remainder of the grease in the cup into a second container revealed a wealth of rich brown congealed turkey-bacon consommé, which plooped with a ploop into the pan with the roux and then melted into a very runny sauce. I added flour to thicken, whisking constantly, then added pepper and oregano to taste, then water to thin it back out when Jessie complained that I had made kitchen-paste.

Eight ounces of Swiss cheese got chopped up in place of curds, because QFC, while fancy, is not Whole Paycheck, and I didn't feel like going to Bellevue for an abomination. It felt a little too much like a violation of the Mann Act.

Frying potatoes turned out to be surprisingly complicated. First, I didn't dry out the water from the pan completely after rinsing it, so when the oil got hot, it immediately started to spatter, and of course I had no luck finding the spatterguard, so I just had to turn the heat down and wait, then wipe up most of the mess. Then I had the heat down too low for fear of scorching, which meant the potatoes didn't really fry so much as sog. When I did turn the heat up to medium-high, though, they almost instantly crisped up for their own good and turned the golden-brown I usually only see in 1970s-era cookbooks as a favored carpet shade. I spatulated them onto paper towels to dry.

The final combination was really just pouring all of the ingredients into a bowl in layers, plus some crumbled bacon from a bag from Costco, and a can of peas that I added specifically so that I could say I had consumed some kind of vegetable matter with dinner. The result... looked about as appealing as only a bowl of pepper gravy with Swiss cheese lumps and forlorn peas sticking out of it could. I didn't take a picture; I thought I would spare you all the pain.

The taste, though....

Jessie insists that the Swiss cheese is the wrong flavor—excuse me, flavour—and that I should've headed down to Bellevue to get cheddar curds. I, however, think that it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the dish. That's French for "what the fuck." Whatever it is, it's gravy and potatoes and bacon and cheese and okay yeah there's a pea here and there but it's gravy and potatoes and bacon and cheese and what more you ask for?

Of course, having intentionally made poutine south of the Kanukistan border, I'm probably on the hook for some kind of violation of a treaty somewhere. I can only hope my above apology and the threat of an orbital lightning cannon are enough to restore international relations.